Once again, judging a book by its cover has paid off, as I picked up The Autobiography of God, by Julius Lester, due to the startling title and the cover’s appearance of being a torah mantle, with Hebrew letters embroidered across the top reading b’reishit barati, a pun on the beginning of Genesis, b’reishit barah elohim. Thus, instead of In the beginning, the Lord created..., it reads In the beginning, I created... Well, I figured it was worth a look.
The book itself is about Rebecca, a rabbi who has left the pulpit to be a therapist/counselor at a small liberal arts college in Vermont. Much of her life is really evocatively described, particularly (for me) a reluctant and abortive attempt to hold shabbat services in her home for the scattered non-observant Jews of the region. I both wanted to attend those services, and recognized the frustration and aggravation of them; when she stopped them, I was both relieved and disappointed.
One of the regulars at the service is a Christian, a religious scholar, who pressures Rebecca to get one of the Holocaust scrolls made available by a European foundation; the scroll arrives after she puts a stop to the services, and its appearance brings Rebecca’s religious crisis to a head, more or less simultaneous with Events on campus. This is where the book gets all supernatural. Rebecca is visited by the dead, and then she is given the titular book, and then she has a series of conversations with the Lord. If you want to, you can interpret the entire series of events as hallucinations or delusions, or as manifestations of her own psyche; the book reads just fine that way. I read it as actual visitations. The difference is that if they are in Rebecca’s mind (or soul), you can interpret the actions of the Divine as presented as Rebecca’s vision, rather than as the author’s.
At any rate the book is about theodicy. Love God, hate evil. Evil is presented in two guises in the book, as the immensity of Auschwitz (of the Holocaust, actually, but Auschwitz is here, as elsewhere, synecdoche for all the death camps, for Warsaw and for Kristallnacht and all the death and destruction under the Nazis) and for a single murder of a young woman at the college. Rebecca learns, in the end, to love the Lord, despite his responsibility for evil. The Lord, as well, learns to accept both the responsibility and the love.
Anyway, it’s a provocative and interesting book; both deeply religious and deeply blasphemous. I don’t agree with Mr. Lester’s theology entirely, but I am glad to have encountered it in this way. And to have encountered him; I somehow hadn’t been aware of him before, and he has led a very interesting life, and seems to write well. I think I’ll get another of his books sometime.
Thank you,
-Vardibidian.